MeCHeM
david.nikdel posted in Uncategorized on February 6th, 2006
These are some screenshots of MeCHeM, a game three friends and I made as our entry into the Hidden Agenda Game Development Contest in 2004. The focus of this contest is a concept called “stealth education”. Supporters of stealth education subscribe to the notion that kids (in this case middle school students) can learn without realizing they are being taught. MeCHeM tried to teach the concepts of basic chemistry by allowing kids to build robots out of various real-life materials at pit them against eachother to see what sort of reactions occur. The kids were given acces to a website with a large database containing information on every chemical element and a large number of compounds. Their performance in the game was tied directly to their knowledge of the interactions of these substances in a very non-artificial way. For instance, if your opponent’s armor were made of Lead and you hit it with a Hydrogen-burning flame thrower, knowledge the combustion temperature of Hydrogen and the melting point of Lead would allow you to predict what happens next. On the other hand, if you chose instead to use your rail gun (a kinetic energy weapon), you would do much less damage because Lead is very dense and thus resistant to that sort of damage.
To make a long story short, we ended up winning the contest. In the end, this netted us a cool $25,000, but the whole experience was amazing and a little surreal. For the final round of judging our entire team flew out to Austin, TX. Even as we were getting on the plane, we were on the phone with Lauren (the contest coordinator) doing tech support for the judging session which was going on simultaniously and praying we had fixed the last problem. When we got there, we saw all the other entries and they were all very good, so we were a bit worried. But we had a killer presentation and a solid game which the judges (including teachers, middle school students, and Richard Garriot of NCSoft) actually seemed to enjoy so it all worked out in the end.
Now, as for the game itself, before you judge too harshly, the entire development cycle was only 6 months from concept to judging. The team was composed of four people including myself (game client and game server programmer), Josh Sachs who did the web interface for robot configuration, Jason Schwartz who did all the visuals, and Alex Hamrick whom we brought on board as a technical writer and who managed the presentation of the game at the final judging.
In addition to the tight schedule and sparse team, we chose not to use an off-the-shelf game engine because we couldn’t find one that supported the 2.5D look we were going for. In the end, the time I used to develop the scene scripting engine and overall display system might have been better spent on improving our networking code (this was my first crack at raw TCP/IP coding) or adding more levels, but I’m pretty happy with the way it turned out anyway. I like the fact that we had a distinct look, and I definately learned a lot writing the engine from scratch.
